Pirates, profits and turning the page in the digital era

As writing and publishing heavyweights prepare for the London book fair next month, russia now looks at the prospects for this fast-changing business. Global recession, rampant piracy, encroachment of television, digital expansion – it’s time for a rethink in the book world, says one expert.

Interview with Vladimir Grigoriev, deputy head of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications

Is the Russian book market currently undergoing a crisis?

I have been working with books on a professional level for 25
years. I can’t remember a single year in which some publisher didn’t lament how
bad everything is. And despite all the technological revolutions that allegedly
threaten books, despite the emergence of sound recordings, radio and
television, the book lives on.

The
numbers say the market is shrinking: total circulation amounted to 716.6
million copies in 2009 and 653.8 million in 2010, while the number of titles
fell to 121,000 from 127,000.

The
book market should not be considered separately from the media market or the
country’s economy. The global crisis erupted in 2008 and our segment of the
economy is slow to respond. The book publishers managed through the first half
of 2009 and everyone began having problems later that summer. The book industry
is one of the last to be affected by the crisis and one of the last to emerge
from it. This was the case in [the financial meltdown] in 1998, when the market
experienced a very difficult time recovering.

Is the growth in electronic literature a good thing?

It’s
good from the reader’s perspective. It requires that publishers and the
authorities take a systematic approach to creating a new market. At present,
80pc of texts travelling in the Russian segment of the internet are pirated. If
the market is organised, systematised and regulated, then neither publisher nor
author suffers and books cost less for a reader because printing and paper
expenses are removed from the overall cost. A system should be created in which
authors and publishers get what they are entitled to.

And how should this system be created?

There are two important factors here. On the one hand, after 70
years of Soviet rule, we are used to compensating for the severity of the law
by disobeying it. This is why a person who was raised in Soviet times has the
mindset of “The government has always stolen from me, so why should I pay
somebody for something?” This is how we ended up in the current situation. An
identical situation is currently taking place in the audio and video
industries, while the same thing happened with the video market in the
Nineties. We need to educate the law-abiding population and create an atmosphere
in which stealing is not considered cool. In principle, more than half of the
population is prepared to pay reasonable money for electronic books. On the
other hand, a normal system needs to be created where people who want an
electronic text don’t jump around from site to site and put their credit cards
at risk.

But
who should be in charge of all this, the government?

The government will facilitate and contribute to this process, but
the main initiative should come from the market. The book-selling companies and
the publishers will serve as the basis for the creation of a normal system of
relations between consumers and manufacturers.

All kinds of people are currently fighting against copyrights
in their current form. There are people who don’t want to pay publishers and
those who believe that art belongs to everyone. Then others argue that the only
way to save the country from an onslaught of illiteracy is to make all books
publicly available. What do you make of this?

Trendsetting publisher

Vladimir Grigoriev is deputy head of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications and a leading expert in the Russian book market. Born in 1958, he worked as an editor for the Novosti news agency, after which he founded and directed the publishing house Vagrius, one of the trendsetters i n Russia’s ever-changing literature scene.

This
is a total distortion. First of all, there is public domain. All the classics
are there. Second, there are many authors who are prepared to make their texts
publicly available on the internet. As part of the policy of modernisation that
our leaders have announced, different types of libraries, media libraries and
electronic information centres that are accessible electronically are popping
up across the country. You go to the library and if you want to read a book
online, it is accessible free of charge. If you want to print a copy, then you
have to pay for it. I think legislation can be built around this framework. The
digitalisation of the book market could eventually become a lifesaver for all
the readers around Russia.How
do you regard the recent boom in the numbers of small publishers in recent
years?

Small
publishers now have a strong sense of injustice: big publishers own bookstore
chains and are trying to build virtual monopolies. Seeing no other way out, the
small publishers knock on their doors and are offered the most unfavourable
terms, after which they begin searching for alternative ways to distribute
their books. For example, they look for allies among their own ranks. One day
we will come to realise that book sales and publishing need to be separated.
Otherwise, we are going to run into a dead end.

It
appears you are convinced that the market will regulate itself without the
government’s intervention.

Our book-publishing industry is almost 95pc private and
market-oriented. If we dig, we find something similar in the history of the
British, American and German book publishing industries. They had the same
problems with growth in the market and growth in business.

What
do you think the Russian book market will look like in 2030?

There will be a print-on-demand or similar digital equipment in
every regional library, every post office branch around the country . Anywhere
in Russia, people will be able to access books electronically or print them,
and there will be no need for trucks to carry books from Moscow to Vladivostok.
At the same time, traditional books will have been preserved, but mainly those
with elements of high literary art and design.